Accused child killer awaits decision

A judge will review the “sheer volume of information” about a Thibodaux man accused of decapitating his son before issuing a written ruling Thursday afternoon on his competency to go to trial.

Katie UrbaszewskiStaff Writer

A judge said he will review the “sheer volume of information” about a Thibodaux man accused of decapitating his son before issuing a written ruling Thursday afternoon on his competency to go to trial.Jeremiah Wright, 31, has not entered a plea to the first-degree murder charge involving his 7-year-old son. If state District Judge Judge John LeBlanc finds him ready to stand trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys have suggested he may enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.If LeBlanc finds Wright incompetent, he heads back to the psychiatric hospital that determined he is competent, where doctors may try again to treat him to improve his mental state.The hearing does not have any bearing on whether Wright was insane at the time of the murder. LeBlanc must only determine if Wright can understand the court proceedings and sufficiently help his attorneys make his case.LeBlanc, who has presided over about a week’s worth of testimony from doctors, expert witnesses and others, said he believes at least some of those stipulations have been met.“The issue, I believe, ... is whether Mr. Wright can assist counsel. ... I don’t think there’s any dispute that he understands the nature of the proceedings,” the judge said.Since the Aug. 14, 2011, death of his son Jori Lirette, Wright has professed a belief that the boy was a CPR dummy or a robot — not a real person, according to witness testimony. Jori was placed in Wright’s life as a government social experiment to teach him about life, Wright has reportedly told at least a dozen investigators and experts.“It wasn’t a real person,” Wright told a director at the mental hospital. “His skull was made of plastic. He had foam in him.”Expert witnesses who testified during the six-day hearing have given different opinions of whether such a delusion would hinder his ability to assist his legal counsel. Some say yes; others say no.Wright later told a hospital psychologist that Jori was his son “right up to the end.” “The more I cut with a hacksaw, the more I saw it was real. The blood and guts convinced me,” Wright said, according to the psychologist’s documents read aloud in court.Though several experts testified that Wright still harbors this delusion, another psychiatrist tasked with determining his competency suggested that may not be true.A hallmark of the hearing has been the range of issues on which expert psychologists and psychiatrists have disagreed, even on things as straightforward as counting Wright’s scores on psychological tests. Robert Storer, a former psychologist at the state mental hospital in Jackson, testified Monday as a rebuttal witness for the defense. He said a test the hospital experts claim shows that Wright is competent actually shows “clinically significant impairment.”“You can put 10 of these guys on the stand and let them give me a test, and they would all come up with different conclusions,” Laforche Parish District Attorney Cam Morvant II said in his closing argument to the judge.“Mental-health diagnosis and treatment is not necessarily a science,” Storer said. “There’s a lot of interpretation and art that comes into it because each individual is different.”The hearing, which ran from Tuesday through Saturday and ended Monday, is an unusual occurrence to begin with, Morvant said. Typically, the judge makes his decision solely based on the report from the mental hospital. But the team of court-appointed attorneys, required by law to be versed in death-penalty cases, challenged the competency report. “This is the first competency hearing I’ve participated in in my 30 years at the DA’s Office,” Morvant said.Doctors at the state hospital treated Wright to see if they could restore his competence after LeBlanc ruled Wright was not fit to stand trial in October 2011.In her closing argument, one of Wright’s attorneys, Mildred Methvin, argued the team didn’t “restore” him to competence but only said he was faking a mental illness.As far as those doctors were concerned, “only one outcome was acceptable” in their final report about Wright — fit to stand trial, Methvin argued.Neither the hospital’s report nor Wright’s contradictory statements “support a finding that Mr. Wright is not suffering from psychosis,” Methvin said.The doctors at the state hospital are an impartial entity, Morvant countered.“I have no personal opinion regarding this particular motion in this case,” he said after the hearing.Morvant said he did not contact doctors there until after they issued their report.“The prosecution had no control over the process,” he said, adding that the doctors work for the hospital.

Staff Writer Katie Urbaszewski can be reached at 448-7617 or katie.urbaszewski@dailycomet.com.

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